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| Peter Rushforth |
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In the community of Australian wood-fire potters no one generates more respect than Peter Rushforth. He first fired a kiln with wood more than 50 years ago at a time when wood-firing in Australia was in its infancy. He is one of the most influential teachers and artists in Australian ceramics, who during his career, has influence a whole generation of Australian potters.
After a long potting and teaching career Peter returned to wood kilns after moving to Shipley, in the Blue Mountains. With a formidable background of teaching and exhibiting, he has developed an aesthetic sensitivity that guides his choice of materials and form. He has discovered his own harmony of living and working and that is reflected in his work. There is a serenity, a contentment in his life, and the pattern of making, glazing and firing enables him to express these feelings through this medium.
Peter Rushforth has done extensive research on Jun (Chun), Tenmoku, limestone, and ash glazes which he uses to produce his high-fired stoneware vessels. These glazes have their origin in the classical period of Chinese and Japanese ceramics, but the use of local materials and the personal statement of the potter makes them relevant to our own society. Produced in a wood-fired kiln, each of his pots is unique in its form and glaze quality.
The successful nature of the glaze relates both to the form of the piece and the association they have to his surroundings at Shipley. Rushforth has said of his work "My aim is to create forms that have life and vitality, colours and textures that are unique to earth materials fired to high temperatures in such a way that glazes and forms are related. The inner value of such work strangely reveals not only qualities of beauty inherent in the materials and processes, but also reveals much of the maker. His pots evoke the qualities of the environment where he lives; the forms may speak of gentleness, of harmony, of peace or otherwise."
Rushforth’s work is all stoneware: blossom jars, lidded vessels, bowls and dishes. One must look for a unity of expression where form, colour, weight, balance, texture and presence satisfy the sense of eye and touch. There needs to be an invitation to handle, pick up, turn the pot over and around and feel its mass and tactile qualities in the hands. And this is only the start, for whoever possesses the pot the cycle is potentially endless. There is always the ceremony of placing the pot within one’s own environment and the use to which it may be put by the owner - this is the continuing creative process of enjoyment offered by the potter.
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